How Much Staging Does Your Home Need? Here’s How to Decide

To give your home its best chance as selling fast and for top dollar, at least some degree of home staging will help you meet that goal. It’s been proven time and time again that most buyers respond more positively to staged homes than non-staged homes.

But how much staging does your home need? It can be hard to distinguish what you should spend time staging and what is okay to stay. Here are some tips to help you decide where your effort and money will be best invested.

Deciding How Much Home Staging Your Home Needs

Put yourself in a buyer’s shoes

When you place a property on the market, the focus is no longer on what you love and what makes you feel at home there. It’s all about the buyers. Searching for a home to buy is an exciting process, but it’s not without its pressures. Remember, buying a home is one of the largest purchases most people will ever make, so they want to get it right.

That’s why emotion often comes into play. If you can make the buyer feel at home as soon as they walk in, you’re that much closer to getting the amount you are hoping for and selling it fast. To do this, the home needs to be as neutral as possible so they can imagine their own décor in its place. Anything that reminds them that they are walking through a stranger’s home or turns them off it isn’t there taste will break that emotional connection you want to cultivate.

Take photos

When you look at your home every day, it’s hard to see it objectively. That’s one of the reasons it is so beneficial to get the opinion of a real estate agent and professional home stager. Another helpful trick is to take photos of your home and then look at the photos. This gets us one step away from actually being in the home as we look at it, allowing us to see things the way a buyer would if the photo was on the MLS. It helps you see it from a more objective standpoint.

After taking the photos, study them carefully. What jumps out at you at first? Do the rooms appear small? Cluttered? Awkward or unbalanced? Do they grab your eye or are they just “blah”? Does that one accent wall with bright red wallpaper look even more dramatic and distracting than you thought?

Consider the market

While there are certain factors that are true regardless of what region you’re in, some areas have variables that you could take advantage of when staging your home for sale. For example, if you’re in a neighborhood near good schools that a lot of families move into, make sure the spare bedrooms are staged as bedrooms and stage a bonus room as a playroom or game room. However, if the market your home is in will likely be shown to a lot of bachelors, it would be better to stage it with that kind of buyer in mind, such as turning that bonus room into an entertaining area and one of the spare bedrooms into an office.

Talk to a professional

The best way to get an objective assessment of your home and a direct line to what your perfect buyer is looking for is to consult a professional. Professional stagers like us devote all of our time to understanding the market and what buyers respond to. We’ll be able to give you clear, personalized advice that will help your home stand out from the competition and sell faster for top dollar.